Friday, January 31, 2014

For those celebrating today, our family wishes you a Happy New Year!
My interest in Lunar New Year celebrations began when I had a chance to visit Hong Kong in 2003. After that trip, I was eager to learn more about how the holiday is celebrated.
When Lily was born, we received a Qipao infant dress from a family member who was teaching in Asia. I love Qipao dresses and thought it would be fun to take a photo of the girls in a Qipao each year – hence the beginning of the lunar new year photography project. By the time Lily turns 12, we should have a photo for each Zodiac sign. This is the 2014 photo - the graphics are scanned from the special edition Pinkie Pie CNY My Little Pony packaging.
Next week, the girls will perform two songs in Cantonese at their CNY concert.
My girl friend recently returned from Hong Kong. During her stay she took some photos of CNY decorations and CNY miniatures dioramas . She allowed me to share them here.
Can you believe the details in these amazing miniatures? The miniature dioramas depict traditional food and celebratory customs.
Happy New Year and have a wonderful weekend (the artic temperatures left last evening and we are preparing for more snow!)
Gong Hai Fat Choi,

Monday, January 27, 2014

So this little guy is responsible for my lack of posts. We decided to include him in our crafting this weekend. You might recall that last year we created a little kissing licking booth for our lab Ramsey. He actually won “pet of the month” for that photo in the community paper and the girls still talk about that project.

Lily wanted to recreate a similar booth for our new pup, Silus.
Si is 17 weeks now. He is housebroken, but still requires quite a bit of training to break those naughty habits (jumping, begging, chewing, etc.). He does not like the recent –20C temperatures so it has been a difficult to ensure that he gets enough outdoor exercise to temper the inside hyper-puppy spurts.
For our booth, we used a cardboard box and wrapped the box in a dollar store plastic table cloth. I am not sure he was pleased about this, but he sure enjoyed the bacon rewards.
Happy Crafting,

Monday, January 6, 2014

Happy New Year! It’s time to bring this little space into 2014. We had a very happy Christmas and New Year, although Lily and my nephew came down with some sort of Norwalk/stomach flu virus(ugh) over New Year’s (thankfully, it was over quickly!).
It is frightfully cold (the so called “polar vortex”) and I am worried about what the next 48 hours will bring - fiercely studying the literature on how to prevent frozen pipes.
On the crafting front, we are gearing up for the Lunar New Year (Jan. 31) and I thought I would share this quick and easy project using recycled red money envelopes (lai see in Cantonese / hóngbāo in Mandarin) . We have acquired quite a collection of money envelopes (from several friends and my husband’s colleagues and students).
For this project, we cut out a number of horses from recycled cardboard (cereal boxes, etc.). For a template we used a dala horse template because of it is simple cutting lines, but something more elaborate would be beautiful. If you have a horse cookie cutter that would work as a template as well. We painted the cardboard in acrylics (yellow or red or gold). After the paint had dried, we made coats / blankets for our horses using the money envelopes. We cut the envelopes to the desired size and glued them to our cardboard houses.
All the pretty horses! We might attach our horses to a banner or a mobile or use them for place settings. We haven’t decided yet.
P.S. Canada Post releases the CNY Year of the Horse postage stamp on January 13th!
Happy crafting,